>Financial Times - February 24, 2000
>CALL FOR OVERHAUL OF IMF AND WORLD BANK EXPECTED
I'm surprised few LBO-talkers had anything to say about this article. Basking in the glow of their symbolic victory in Seattle, segments of the anti-WTO coalition (especially the Naderite and the anarchist segments) seem to have forgotten that both the libertarian right and the nativist/isolationist right have their own critiques of the Bretton Woods institutions. Libertarians take issue with IMF bailouts that reward the "aberrant behavior" of miscalculating investors and "crony capitalists" (sic) in the Third World -- the so-called "moral hazard" problem. Nativists/isolationists resent the degree to which U.S. participation in multilateral institutions compromises U.S. "sovereignty" (i.e. its unilateral imperialism). Although the populist left's critique of the Bretton Woods institutions focuses heavily on a) the way in which the policies of these institutions aid and abet the power of the transnational corporations (similar to the populist left's analysis of "corporate welfare") and b) the "unelected and unaccountable" status of these institutions, the populist left fails to recognize that a) bears a similarity to the libertarian gripe and b) bears a similarity to the isolationist gripe, setting the stage for many an unholy political alliance.
To vulgarize (at the risk of oversimplification), the Bretton Woods institutions are the "superstructure" of global capitalism, and the TNC's are the phenomenal form of global capital. While it is true that people are rarely roused to fight an abstract system, and instead are usually roused to fight the concrete effcts of that system, I think the successive mobilizations against the WTO/IMF/IBRD (and the TNC's) tend to reify these institutions/organizations as the _sources_ of economic inequality/ecological ruin in the world. The theoretical confusion that follows makes possible all sorts of unwitting alliances with both the libertarian and isolationist right, and will incline the "movement" to falsely identify triumphs, and prematurely declare victory. What happens if the Congress, feeling pressure from the left and the right, sharply curtails funding for the IMF/IBRD ? Does global capitalism/imperialism automatically come to an end ?
I found the piece on the WTO declaring that tax breaks for offshore affiliates of U.S. TNC's to be unfair "export subsidies" hilariously ironic b/c there is no room in the populist left's conceptual toolkit to make sense of this event. How could the WTO come out against U.S. TNC's ? Because the WTO is simply a mediator between different blocs of global capital, not the system itself, something you rarely hear from the populist left. In fact, since the populist left is such a stauch opponent of "corporate welfare" (which in certain respects puts them in the same league as libertarian advocates of the "night watchman state"), in this case, using their own standards of judgment, they'd have to celebrate the WTO's ruling against "corporate welfare" for U.S. TNC's !!!
On a somewhat related front, I found certain aspects of the article that ChuckO sent on the post-N30 activist generation rather amusing. The white middle class anarchists bemoan the absence of "people of color" in their loosely affiliated anti-global system coalition, and vow to work on their own racism to better build a broad coalition. Their repeated usage of the term "people of color" is a dead giveaway of their much-despised middle class social background, since few "people of color" use the very term to describe themselves, save those who are part of the intelligentsia, or at least have spent a few years attending a liberal arts university or college reading Bell Hooks and Cornel West. Their proposals to work on their own racism basically sound like liberal therapy techniques (bring in the "anti-racism training" counselor after he/she's done w/his "conflict resolution" seminar !!!), another artifact of their much-despised middle-classness. They can't even bring themselves to use the phrase "working class" -- "people of color" stands in for all those oppressed people they want to reach but have failed to reach. Finally, they fundamentally fail to recognize that their opposition to everything the WTO et al represents comes from a structurally different position from working-class blacks, Mexican and Southeast Asian immigrants, etc. Apart from their genuine empathy for the oppressed humans/animals of the world (I do not say this facetiously), white middle class anarchists hate the WTO (emblematic of global capitalism) because they are educated, creative, community-loving folks who hate the fact that the system increasingly limits their opportunities to exercise their capacities (unless they "sell out" and go to work for Microsoft and live in a gated community, which would defeat the purpose). It's not a position I'm unsympathetic with (being a disenchanted/alienated white middle class 31-year-old radical stuck in grad school and dreading the future), but it's light years away from the reasons why your garden variety working class/poor white/African-American/Latino/etc. might or does hate the WTO and everything it stands for.
John Gulick